Prosody is the fundamental organizing principle of spoken language, carrying lexical, morphosyntactic, and pragmatic information. It, therefore, provides highly relevant input for language development. Are infants sensitive to this important aspect of spoken language early on? In this study, we asked whether infants are able to discriminate well-formed utterance-level prosodic contours from ill-formed, backward prosodic contours at birth. This deviant prosodic contour was obtained by time-reversing the original one, and super-imposing it on the otherwise intact segmental information. The resulting backward prosodic contour was thus unfamiliar to the infants and ill-formed in French. We used near-infrared spectroscopy (NIRS) in 1-3-day-old French newborns (n = 25) to measure their brain responses to well-formed contours as standards and their backward prosody counterparts as deviants in the frontal, temporal, and parietal areas bilaterally. A cluster-based permutation test revealed greater responses to the Deviant than to the Standard condition in right temporal areas. These results suggest that newborns are already capable of detecting utterance-level prosodic violations at birth, a key ability for breaking into the native language, and that this ability is supported by brain areas similar to those in adults.

中文翻译：

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新生儿区分话语级韵律轮廓

韵律是口语的基本组织原则，承载词汇、形态句法和语用信息。因此，它为语言发展提供了高度相关的输入。婴儿是否很早就对口语的这一重要方面敏感？在这项研究中，我们询问婴儿是否能够在出生时区分格式正确的话语级韵律轮廓和格式错误的落后韵律轮廓。这种异常的韵律轮廓是通过对原始轮廓进行时间反转并将其叠加在其他完整的片段信息上而获得的。因此，由此产生的反向韵律轮廓对婴儿来说是不熟悉的，并且在法语中是错误的。我们对 1-3 天大的法国新生儿 ( n = 25) 测量他们的大脑对结构良好的轮廓的反应作为标准，他们的反向韵律对应物作为双侧额叶、颞叶和顶叶区域的偏差。基于集群的排列测试显示，在右颞区，对异常状态的反应比对标准状态的反应更大。这些结果表明，新生儿在出生时就已经能够检测出言语水平的韵律违规，这是闯入母语的关键能力，并且这种能力得到与成人相似的大脑区域的支持。